The future of yoga is online

By: Yogacharya

Doing yoga at home is not just for yoga teachers and hard-core yogis. It’s what we should all be striving to do, in my opinion. Now, with the internet, it’s easier than ever … but it can be potentially dangerous too!

The internet didn’t exist though, when I first started yoga. Perhaps that was a good thing. The only real option (to me at least) was going to India … the source, which is exactly what I did, spending years in yoga ashrams and studying with various yoga teachers along the way.

But still, I felt like something was missing. It wasn’t until I found Swami Gitananda’s “Yoga Step By Step” correspondence course that the “yoga lightbulb(s) finally came on. Yeah, I know … but this was no ordinary yoga book. It was a yoga masterpiece, and my understanding of yoga has never been the same since.

That program really taught me what yoga was all about … and it demonstrated to me that, when done skilfully, yoga can indeed be taught in this medium … and taught very effectively.

Over the years, I have experimented with various “non-traditional” yoga teachings methods of my own. Ever since the early days of the internet, I’ve known that this would eventually become the next yoga frontier. Now, after many versions and variations, I have some solid training programs online that seem to be doing a good job teaching people how to practice yoga at home.

There’s no substitute to yoga instruction live and in person, which is why I will always teach yoga classes. But I know that there are also many limitations to this modern way of teaching, which is why I have created more comprehensive yoga training programs online.

The internet is an important tool for the future of yoga, one that only a very few teachers have realized so far. The zillion yoga websites out there today haven’t gotten it yet. But some yoga teachers are honing their web development skills and recognizing the power that cyberspace has for spreading the transformative power of yoga around the globe. When more enlightened folks start to clue in to this potential, the future of yoga online looks very enlightening indeed.

——————————-Yogacharya is the Director of International Yogalayam, Editor of The Yoga News, and creator of The Yoga Tutor, a step-by-step online yoga training website.